David Geffen Wants To Buy the L.A. Clippers

In the hours since NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced that the Los Angeles Clippers’ longtime owner Donald Sterling would be banned from the league and a forced sale of the team would be encouraged, a host of big names have expressed interest in taking the team off Sterling’s hands. The octogenarian millionaire, whose swift downfall was precipitated by the airing of an audio recording last weekend in which he made racist remarks (and who happens to also have a long, public history of unsavory business behavior), does not appear to be long for the world of NBA ownership.

Joining a list that includes former NBA star Magic Johnson (who was named by Sterling in his now-infamous racist rant) and the rapper P. Diddy, Jewish billionaire David Geffen has thrown his hat into the ring, Reuters reports. Geffen, the media mogul behind Asylum Records, Geffen Records, and DreamWorks, which he co-founded in 1994 with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, is worth an estimated $6.2 billion, according to Forbes.

He’s clearly serious about buying the team, having already tried to do so in 2010, offering Sterling—who bought the team in 1981 for $12 million—a whopping $700 million, which Sterling turned down. This time around, though, Geffen could make an offer Sterling literally can’t refuse.